“If I hear one more of our people saying that deckchairs are being shuffled on the Titanic,” a government supporter of Keir Starmer confided to the Daily Mail, “I will scream.” No need for shrieks. The prime minister’s No 10 hokey cokey on Monday wasn’t so much shuffling the deckchairs as restructuring the deck crew and announcing that some fresh faces will enable the team to work with new focus towards their ultimate goal of reshuffling. Expect the first strategy whiteboard to be broken out 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.
For now, hold on to your aperitifs and continue to dress for dinner, because the erstwhile chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, becomes something called chief secretary to the prime minister. To Starmer, Darren is a Mr Fixit; to many of his cabinet colleagues, he is a Mr Fuxit. That’s not the official line Downing Steet is going with, preferring instead to claim that yet another reset means Starmer is focused on “relentless delivery”. Delivery of what? They’ve barely passed any legislation. Hand on heart, meanwhile, I’m not sure the word “relentless” means what Starmer reckons it does. All he ever does is relent, on both staff and policy. The role of his comms chief, for example, is now essentially a gig economy job, while doing a monthly U-turn is the only thing he hasn’t U-turned on. We are watching a movie in which it’s not clear what the main character wants. Unsurprisingly, it has turned out to be box-office poison.
